"Remarkable" Dawn

Today's post is of dawn over the Remarkables mountain range just outside of Queenstown New Zealand. The image was taken on my last morning in Queenstown and came after a rather sleepless night as we had just experienced the effects of the word's strongest earthquake of 2009.

The night before, I was in bed in my hotel just before 8:30 pm (had to be up well before dawn to get this shot you see here!) and heard the glassware in the mini bar start to jingle and then the bed started to quiver ( the bed was NOT equipped with "Magic Fingers"!). I realized we were having an earthquake and stood in the door as "protection". I was on the 4th floor of my hotel and could definitely feel the building swaying. I remember thinking the whole building was going to collapse. Was I better off to be up that high or to try to so down the stairs to the street? I recall not liking the results of either scenario! Of course the quake did not last long ( about 70 seconds by most accounts). The quake epicenter was centered about 136 miles from my hotel and was later determined to be a 7.8 on the Richter Scale followed by a 6.1 aftershock. Because of my distance from the epicenter it was estimated that Queenstown experienced the equivalent of a 5.8 quake. Still pretty scary I have to say!  Thankfully there was minimal damage caused by this quake because the southern tip of NZ's South Island is sparsely populated and the building codes there are superb  due to the natural seismic activity there. HERE is the BBC's reporting of this earthquake.


The next morning was a cold, crisp morning and we headed out to the shores of Lake Wakatipu to set up in the predawn for what we hoped would be a brilliant sunrise. The earliest light did not have much in the sky to work with, but the clouds you see were nice enough to drift in and color up nicely to give this rosy warm glow right over the Remarkables.After happily shooting this scene, we headed further north to spend a few days near Aoraki/Mt. Cook to photograph New Zealand's tallest peak. Click HERE to see my recent post of LAST LIGHT on that magnificent peak.

Rosy Fingered Dawn Over the Remarkables

Lake Wakatipu, New Zealand

Click in the image to see it in the original gallery.

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